July 13, 2012

I reached the first milestone of the
game that I'm working on solo, which I'm calling "Comrades"
for the time being. Nate and I have decided to each make our own
games where we will do both the coding and artwork for completely on
our own. Nate's game is the Arctic Space Monkeys game which you can
check out on the post below.

The game started as me wanting to
create a game like Zombies Ate My Neighbors that uses some rougelike
elements (the name "Comrades" comes from the joke name
"Mutants Ate My Comrades" which I was calling it at first.)
I was having a hard time figuring out what I wanted the game to be,
and when I didn't like where it was going, I changed it completely. Now instead of a real time shooter, its a turn based rougelike.

I wanted to make a rougelike that uses
more exploring instead of starting at dungeon floor 1 and going to
the bottom. So for Comrades, I created a Zelda like overworld that
the player explores in. The overworld itself is not meant to be too
dangerous, but it contains the dungeons that the player is trying to
find. I'm planning on having three dungeons that the player can go to in any order.

So I hit milestone 1 today, which is
the most basic bare-bone version of the game. I started doing
milestones in projects, with each milestone being a complete game
(you can win or lose.) The first milestone is obviously the most
basic version of the game. I like setting up check points this way
because then you can make sure you get all the essentials in the game
first and then built up all the cool details along the way.

The first milestone has:

-3 types of enemies

-enemies can kill you (lose game)

-you can kill enemies

-basic level generation

-3 area types

-basic enemy AI

-rescue survivors (win game)

So now with the first milestone in
place, I have the basic system ready and I can start adding some cool
stuff in. For my next milestone, I will be fleshing out the
procedurally generated areas a bit and adding in new weapons and
items for the player to find and use.